This is an issue about how domestic space organizes our surroundings and habits and values and bodies. It is also about convention: how norms became norms, and how design might gently or violently pull them apart to propose new ways of relating to ourselves and each other in our most intimate settings. It offers a few terms for discussing what can happen when architectural ideas come home.

After working as a photojournalist for the Winnipeg Tribune in the early 1940s, George Hunter became a photographer for the National Film Board of Canada. In 1950, he earned his pilot’s licence, bought a small plane, and started his own business. Crossing Canada several times a year, he shot aerial views of cities and towns for Crown corporations and private companies. His images were published in magazines such as Time, Fortune, and National Geographic and reproduced in encyclopedias, textbooks, and atlases.

Hunter’s extensive corpus of images is a unique record of Canadian urban landscapes in the particular socio-economic context of the 1940s through 1970s, a long period of growth in the country. The photographs above are selected from two series, Canada, Cities, Towns, Villages, Environs: Heritage Images and Communities: To House Industrial Workers.